Guest Post: Writing about characters on the wrong side of history by Paul A. Barra

Please welcome author Paul A. Barra to the blog today as he discusses his new book, Full of Eyes: A Rebel Bishop Mystery.

 

One of the great cultural policies that passed down to the U. S. Navy from the era when Britannia ruled the waves is that certain topics--namely sex, religion and politics—should not be discussed in the wardroom of a commissioned naval vessel. The stricture, generally observed, maintains an atmosphere of comity in Officers Country. Kevin Tipple, the architect of this Kevin’s Corner blog, wisely enforces the same rule for guest bloggers (excepting sex, of course. After all, this is a blog about creative writing) but admits to allowing certain instances when religion and politics are integral to the plot or the make-up of a main character in the book being written about.

 

So I asked Kevin for an exemption from the rule since my commentary is about the difficulty of writing an historical novel from the vantage point of a member of an abhorrent cohort—in my case, slaveholders. I was moved to defend the man who was the spiritual leader of Catholics in both Carolinas during the Civil War once I researched him and came to realize that he had been basically good, perhaps a holy man.

 

The novel in question, launched from D2D as an ebook on January 6 and available at Amazon and a dozen other stores, began when I was researching the life of the third bishop of Charleston for a magazine profile. Patrick N. Lynch was a brilliant orator and writer, famed in the South in the mid-nineteenth century, a polymath, compassionate, heroic in his struggles to do what God asked of him, and admired by the people who knew him even before he became ordinary of the Diocese of Charleston. He was a protege of the beloved founding bishop of the diocese, Bishop John England.

 

Patrick Lynch was also a slaveowner and such an exquisite, eloquent opponent of abolition that no less a personage than Horace Greeley dubbed him The Rebel Bishop in his New York Herald. Not surprisingly, the modern Diocese of Charleston kept him hidden from public view well into this century. With all that packed against him, how could I not write about him?

 

 I found that Lynch was misunderstood, and continues to be misunderstood, so I determined to write a novel featuring him as a real person, a mystery taking place as war is on the near horizon, with a theme of: how did a large part of the nation decide it was okay to own other human beings? Southerners who couldn’t afford a slave—90% of them at least—still considered slavery important enough to their heritage to die for. And die they did.

 

Lynch’s defense of the institution was both scriptural (slavery was common in the bible and Jesus of Nazareth accepted it) and pragmatic (slavery in the South was becoming too expensive and socially problematic, and technology was about to make it unnecessary for planters to maintain hundreds of agrarian slaves, so if Mr. Lincoln could have managed some patience, the institution would have died out on its own, eventually). Those were Bishop Lynch’s arguments. He could not have known that fully one-third of all white South Carolinian males of fighting age (18-50) would end up dying in that conflict, but he knew in 1861 that the nation was embarking on a divisive and horrifying event long before it came to be known by his flock as the War of Northern Aggression.

 

In a work of fiction, I couldn’t have the real Bishop of Charleston hunting clues and chasing bad guys; I made Lynch instead a kind of Nero Wolfe character with his aide an Archie Goodwin-like character and my protagonist. Lynch comes off as a wise and compassionate man in my novel FULL OF EYES (a quote from John’s Revelation); Yankees are the bad guys. I tried not to emphasize the north-south calculation, and the novel is not about the war itself but about a local crime and the drama of finding the killer before the chaos of war descends on them all, but slavery is the overarching theme of the book. Lynch’s aide, Fr. Tom Dockery, is a former NYPD officer who is both devoted to his bishop and shocked by the idea of someone having a deed to another person. The bishop talks about it and Dockery listens. The two must identify and stop a very determined killer, though, so the young priest does not solve his moral dilemma about slavery before the story ends. I’m writing a sequel now.

 

Neither book will be successful unless readers can get past the facts that the Rebel Bishop in real-life owned a house slave (my character Flora) and that his diocese inherited a plantation full of slaves. That made the ordinary of the diocese the owner of them technically. I’m hoping readers will appreciate learning about the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century South, when its membership was puny except in Charleston itself and where those members she did have were often abused by nativists. The book manuscript was vetted by the eleventh Bishop of Charleston and by the historian of the diocese; readers will be informed as they are—hopefully—entertained by following Dockery and a Jesuit friend while they investigate a murder in the cathedral and pursue the murderer.

 

Can modern-day readers identify with or at least appreciate a main character in a novel who defended slavery? Can millions of people from off who have now migrated to Southern states for the gracious way of life they find here ever learn to consider the war from a Southern perspective?

 

FULL OF EYES would have been a lot easier to write if Lynch had carried less baggage into the tale. Writing a novel is difficult enough, God knows, without introducing a sympathetic character who requires a lot of explicating. Some historically significant people just must be written about, however, even if they were on the wrong side of history. I think the Rebel Bishop is one of them.

  

Paul A. Barra ©2022

Paul A. Barra’s last novel, Westfarrow Island, published by The Permanent Press, was called “exciting” by Publishers Weekly. His short story, Assignment: Sheepshead Bay, was selected for the MWA anthology When a Stranger Comes to Town, released by Hanover Square Press in April 2021. Barra has had five novels published, plus a non-fiction book about the founding of a Catholic high school without diocesan approval. He is a decorated former naval officer, was a reporter for local papers and was the senior staff writer for the diocese of Charleston when he researched Bishop Lynch.